Friday, 30 July 2004

blojsom Quickstart available ... Download. Deploy. Running.

I want to make blojsom even easier for users to get up and running quickly. Even if they just download blojsom, play around with it for a bit, and decide it's not for them, I don't want to make it hell for them to install.

Hence, the blojsom quickstart.

Let's cover the finer points of what I'm trying to do here.

1. You download the blojsom.war file
2. You deploy the WAR file to your application server (If your application server supports "hot deployment", you might not need to restart your application server)
3. blojsom is running

Wait?! Say that one more time, but this time be more succint!

1. Download
2. Deploy
3. Running

This quickstart is a working snapshot of blojsom 2.18.

P.S. Even though it's a snapshop of blojsom 2.18, the official release of blojsom is blojsom 2.17.
Posted by david at 4:08 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Thursday, 29 July 2004

blojsom and AtomME

Russell posted an example application to post from a java mobile phone via the Atom API. Tested this out with blojsom. Works like a champ with one minor change. Line 193 from AtomME.java needs to change from:
wsse.append("Nonce=\"" + nonce + "\" ");
to:
wsse.append("Nonce=\"" + Base64.encode(nonce.getBytes()) + "\" ");
Although the raw nonce is used to calculate the PasswordDigest, the value in the header needs to be Base 64 encoded. I just used the Base64 class we had in Sandler as a quick and dirty.

Testing AtomME

Anyhoo...
Posted by david at 10:37 AM in Atom

Wednesday, 28 July 2004

PaceAtomActionHeader

As a follow-up to my post yesterday, "Atom, blojsom, and HTTP PUT", I came across the PaceAtomActionHeader proposal.
This proposal simplifies the PacePutDelete and provides a way for clients that are unable to use PUT and DELETE to access the Atom API.
It looks reasonable to me.
Posted by david at 12:50 PM in Atom

Another day ... Another blog

I'm blogging elsewhere. I wanted to keep the content here focused to blojsom and Java. I'm just that way. I don't plan on migrating any of the posts from this blog to the other blog. To adapt the phrase du jour, "What posts to this blog, stays on this blog."

blojsom takes less than a minute to setup and domains are cheap.

It's been fun, and now we begin again ...

And my new template is valid XHTML 1.0 transitional. Go figure. Fun /images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif
Posted by david at 1:04 AM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

Tuesday, 27 July 2004

Atom, blojsom, and HTTP PUT

The Atom client I've tested blojsom's implementation of the Atom API with is ecto. It's a fine client. However, for editing an entry, which is done using an HTTP put on the entry you are editing, we run into the following situation.
The NSURLConnection framework in MacOSX indeed has a bug that causes it not to send the body with HTTP PUT messages. This bug is fortunately already fixed and should appear in a next OS release.
In this case, ecto uses SOAP encoding to send the edit using an HTTP POST. The server must then parse the SOAP request and "do the right thing". Fortunately blojsom does the right thing.

On the Atom wiki, there's a proposal, PacePutDelete, for clients (e.g. a LOT of Java-enabled mobile phones out there) that cannot execute PUT and DELETE HTTP requests. The alternate proposal at the end seems quite straightforward and doesn't require all the SOAP enabling on the client and server. All that needs to be done on the client is to add a specific HTTP header to indicate the method (say DELETE or PUT) to execute. Handling this on the server is also quite straightforward. In a Java servlet, this would amount to adding some logic to the top of your doPost method to see if the specific Atom header exists and to route to the proper doXXX method accordingly.
Posted by david at 8:48 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Search engine friendly URLs in blojsom

Friendly permalinks. Here is my writeup on the Permalink filter included with blojsom and how to use it. Velocity macro and sample usage included. YMMV if you're using JSP or FreeMarker or Groovy for writing blojsom templates, but I'm sure you get the idea.
Posted by david at 1:08 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

charset="iso-9761-7" ... WTF?!

I don't know what to be more pissed about, the spam message itself or the invalid charset? FYI, here's the Internet Assigned Number Authority's (IANA) page on character sets.

<mr-garrison>You go to hell invalid charset spewing spam creators! You go to hell and you die!</mr-garrison>
Posted by david at 10:22 AM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

blojsom and Flickr

Word is that blojsom works with Flickr. Good deal. There's always the Moblog plugin too.
Posted by david at 12:07 AM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Saturday, 24 July 2004

Rounding out the MetaWeblog API

You are a blog software author. You think you have implemented all there is to implement to support the MetaWeblog API. Think again /images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif

Now you're done!
Posted by david at 10:01 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Wednesday, 21 July 2004

Guitar effects schematics

Link. File under the "Trip to Radio Shack" department /images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif
Posted by david at 2:55 PM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

Tuesday, 20 July 2004

blojsom 2.17 available

<mallrats character="Jay"> Alright lunchbox, let's try this again. </mallrats>

blojsom 2.17, codename: <cartman>Bad Kitty</cartman>, has been released!

Changelog. Upgrading. Download.

1. New web administration interface ... Good
2. New plugins ... Good
3. Improved Atom API support ... Good
4. Contribution(s) ... Good
5. Almost a month since our last release ... On par (basically there was a week there where Mark and I slacked off after the Apple announcement)
6. $0 ... Good

Enjoy!
Posted by david at 9:33 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Axis TCP Monitor Plugin for IntelliJ

Axis TCP Monitor Plugin. The link is outdated. Your best bet is to use the automatic plugin installation from IntelliJ.

If for nothing else, it's useful in debugging web applications between browser and server when you need to see headers and content and don't want to insert debug statements in your code to print out all that information. It's already proven indispensible in the IntelliJ plugin arsenal. That's all for now.

Thanks for Mark for the tip.
Posted by david at 5:37 PM in java ... just java

Monday, 19 July 2004

No Fluff Just Stuff: An Introduction to Internationalization in Java

I'm currently preparing a presentation entitled "An Introduction to Internationalization in Java" for the No Fluff, Just Stuff Java symposiums. I'll be speaking at the conference in Boston, MA, held from October 22nd-24th. I submitted the following as an abstract.
Internationalization is the process of writing software in such a way as to make the localization of the software to a particular region as easy as possible. In other words, internationalization aims to remove the burden of re-engineering an application when writing for multiple countries and/or regions. Localization deals with the translation of textual elements to a particular locale. There are also a number of user interface elements that may be added or removed from a locale to provide the user with a native look and feel to the application. This session will cover many of the aspects of internationalization such as locales, isolating locale-specific data, formatting of data, Unicode, input and output, GUI development, input methods, etc. The session is intended to provide an overview and introduction to the many different aspects of Java internationalization and how these fulfill the promise of "Write Once, Run Anywhere (in the world)".
Now, that's all well and good, but I'd like to structure the parts of the presentation around concerns, issues, questions you currently face with any efforts in software internationalization and localization using Java.

So, what concerns, issues, questions do you have?
Posted by david at 5:23 PM in Internationalization

Sunday, 18 July 2004

Sandler 1.0 available

Sandler is an Atom parser and manipulation library implemented in Java. Sandler provides an idiommatic Java object model for working with Atom feeds, as well as mechanisms to build said object models from various types of XML input. Download.
Posted by david at 9:56 PM in java ... just java

Saturday, 17 July 2004

Slashdot RSS ... now with full descriptions

Looks like the syndication feed for Slashdot now includes full descriptions for their items. It's about time! That wasn't so scary, now was it?
Posted by david at 1:39 PM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

Friday, 16 July 2004

ICU4J: International Components for Unicode for Java

International Components for Unicode (ICU) library
Provides robust and full-featured Unicode services on a wide variety of platforms. ICU supports the most current version of the Unicode standard, and provides support for supplementary characters (needed for GB 18030 repertoire support).
Javadocs. Have a sampling of the Javadocs for Hebrew Calendar.
The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar and thus has a number of interesting properties that distinguish it from the Gregorian. Months start on the day of (an arithmetic approximation of) each new moon. Since the solar year (approximately 365.24 days) is not an even multiple of the lunar month (approximately 29.53 days) an extra "leap month" is inserted in 7 out of every 19 years. To make matters even more interesting, the start of a year can be delayed by up to three days in order to prevent certain holidays from falling on the Sabbath and to prevent certain illegal year lengths. Finally, the lengths of certain months can vary depending on the number of days in the year.
Posted by david at 3:42 PM in Internationalization

Tuesday, 13 July 2004

"And we still haven't walked in the glow of each other's majestic presence"

Ana Ng - They Might Be Giants
Posted by david at 2:53 PM in Quotable Quotes

Teaser screenshots for blojsom's new administration interface

For blojsom 2.17, I've redone the administration interface for easier navigation and a more friendly color scheme. I like it. Click the thumbnails for the larger version.
      The main login screen

      Adding a blog entry

      Editing blog properties

      List of configurable plugins (List populated automatically)
Posted by david at 2:17 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Monday, 12 July 2004

When parents know you write blog software and blog ...

... it's ... well ... interesting.

It's strange enough that they're aware of this blog and the blog software (blojsom). Blogging is now a topic of conversation when I call home. My dad talked tonight about the Democratic and Republican national conventions allowing bloggers in to cover the conventions. He's getting this via the NYTimes. Once I head down there and turn him onto an aggregator, who knows. He's probably one person that could cover the conventions with enough detail and insight that he would be a real threat to the journalists who actually get paid to cover the conventions. I say that only because his knowledge and involvement in politics has always been in somewhat of a pundit role. Maybe he'll be blogging yet.

In a Wayne's World-esque moment, he sort of ended with, "Blog on.".
Posted by david at 11:24 PM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

Thursday, 8 July 2004

"If you don't got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin'"

Punk Rock Girl - Dead Milkmen.
Posted by david at 10:54 PM in Quotable Quotes

Gallery plugin for blojsom

I didn't write it. Michael Richardson wrote it. Gallery is "a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it." As Michael blogged:
It allows you to insert tags into your blog posts like:

<gallery photo="crossroads04/DSC01410">

and have that converted on the fly to a thumbnail link.

It also lets you generate a link to a photo that's picked randomly from a list.

All that and documentation to boot!
Posted by david at 10:49 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

iTrip ... my latest piece of iFlair

It's been almost a week that I've had my iTrip. Overall the sound quality is good. I need to remember that when taking it from the office to the car that I've got to lower the volume. It really does distort the sound quality if I go past 70% volume. Beyond that I haven't had issues with having to change stations in certain areas. So, for the drive back and forth to the office it'll get me by. Not that I won't still burn my iTunes Music Store purchases for posterity, but at least I don't have to switch discs.
Posted by david at 9:07 PM in Appleicious

Wednesday, 7 July 2004

Re: West Coast Bloggers shop

It looks like Mark is to blame for the West Coast Bloggers schwag. And since he says all the proceeds are going to charity, it's all good. I can't wait to read the article.
Posted by david at 10:43 PM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

"You'll never gain weight from a doughnut hole"

"Doughnut Song" - Tori Amos
Posted by david at 3:32 PM in Quotable Quotes

Search Engine Redux #3

Some commentary on searches leading people to my blog. Here goes ...

  • "yogurt with fruit at the bottom" - Mystery solved thanks to this blog post.
  • Too many Dave Chapelle references to count.
  • "chalupa photo" - One can only imagine what one might do with such a photo.
  • "ferris bueller livejournal icons" - Bueller? Beueller? Icons?
  • "concert reverb sound check plan template" - Remember that Far Side cartoon where it showed the guy behind the soundboard turning up the 'Suck' button with the caption 'Ron's last day as the band's sound engineer.'? That was funny.
Posted by david at 12:24 PM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

3 blojsom blogs that ... well ... rock

Whoah. Nice theme. Categories via pull-down.

Nihon. Another great theme. Very .Mac.
Nihon is a group blog of Japan enthusiasts. We started this blog in 2004 with a mix of English and a little bit of Hiragana. Our goal is to blog in Kanji by 2009 (is that too ambitious?). This blog will be a medium for the bloggers to help each other in learning Japanese language and expanding general knowledge about Japan.

Melbourne. Photoblog of the city of Melbourne. Is Australia always that yellow? /images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif

All powered by blojsom.
Posted by david at 12:10 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Tuesday, 6 July 2004

West Coast Bloggers t-shirt

Uh oh Spaghetti-O ... The West Coast Bloggers have their own schwag.

East cost bloggers ... represent!
Posted by david at 12:40 PM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

Sunday, 4 July 2004

"David- Welcome aboard. -Steve"

Apparently when your software is selected to be included in an upcoming release of an Apple operating system, you get a "welcome" package from the Apple corporate office. The interesting thing about your welcome package is that it's personalized and unique. Here's one of the items included in my package.

The inscription on the photo reads, "David- Welcome aboard. -Steve".

Steve Jobs photo

/images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif

Update: OK, this was totally a gag gift from friends, but it's the thought that counts. And you never know, it could happen.
Posted by david at 2:44 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Friday, 2 July 2004

blojsom/OS X Tiger Server Day 5

No post about day 4? No. I was busy. But it still feels good. Happy July.

Who's commenting on blojsom? There have been quite a few trackbacks posted to the blojsom site. I thoroughly enjoyed the end of "Ok, Well, Blojsom Then?".
I guess my point here is that Apple seems to be doing just about the simplest thing that could possibly work, and I'm impressed by their judgement. And Blojsom jumps way up the list of weblogging apps to keep an eye on.

Has anyone converted from WordPress to blojsom? Yes. And it's phunky-licious. But, all because we supported the MetaWeblog API's newMediaObject? /images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif Hey, we each evaluate technologies differently.

What are you working on now? I took a look at XML-backed entries and that was fun since it was simple and straightforward. Maybe this will be added to the codebase in the future.

And then there's blojsom 2.17 stuff. Except it's a holiday weekend here in the US, so I won't be working on it much this weekend.
Posted by david at 3:28 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Experimenting with XML-backed entries in blojsom

As a placeholder for things I want to look at in the future or simply to experiment with for various purposes, I created "The Lab" on our wiki. The first experiment is pretty much a success. I give you XStream testing.

I wanted to demonstrate an implementation for the BlojsomFetcher interface that did not use the blosxom-style format. The code you'll find on that page uses XStream. XStream is "a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again." It couldn't be easier.

All in all, what did this tell me?

  • I can re-use code! I believe there were less than 30 lines of code added to create the XStreamBlogEntry and XStreamFetcher with changes to the comment and trackback plugins.
  • I did not convert the edit blog entires plugin which is used in web administration to allow you to delete comments and/or trackbacks for entries. That still deletes individual comments and trackbacks in the comments/trackback directories. Simple change.
  • XStream is a hell of a lot easier than manipulating a DOM tree. If you look at the code, the actual reading and writing of the object from/to XML is 3 lines of code. That's 6 lines of code. Are you kidding me?
  • Although not a deviation from using the filesystem as the content database, it's another format for the entries themselves ... and it worked.
Well, thanks for reading. Kudos to the XStream guys for a simple library that works as advertised.
Posted by david at 2:42 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom
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